With All the Hype What Can We Really Expect This Evening Out of Samsung's Galaxy S III?

The Samsung Galaxy S III is so close I can almost taste it -- mere hours to wait, and the UK is the place to be too. Launching at 7pm tonight in London, Samsung's next flagship phone looks like it's shaping up to be a real corker, and here's what it'll look like according to all the rumours.

Apparently it's going to be a beast of a phone with a screen around 4.6 to 4.8-inches on the diagonal. Of course that's not phablet territory -- you'd have to push past 5-inches for that -- but it's significantly bigger than say Apple's iPhone, which weighs in at a puny 3.5-inches. It could also be a non-pentile AMOLED screen, with an HD, Retina display-like pixel density, which should mean the screen is super crisp even at that size.

The Galaxy S III seems like it's going to come in several varieties, with blue and white colour variations plus two processor models. In the UK it's likely we'll just get the Samsung Exynos-powered quad-core chip, but it looks like those lucky enough to be sipping the sweet, sweet 4G connectivity of LTE will get a Snapdragon S4 dual-core chip, which is no slouch, honestly.

On the memory front rumours dictate that the S III will pack 1GB of RAM and 16GB of storage backed up by a microSD slot. Combining that with the quad-core chip should keep Ice Cream Sandwich happy and slick, even with TouchWiz on top.

On the camera front there's a bit of debate as to whether the GS III will come packing an eight- or 12-megapixel shooter. Amazon said 12, the Vietnamese said eight -- we'll find out who was on the money later today. We're also expecting it to come packing NFC, just in case it actually takes off this year.

The best rumour of them all, though, has to be that we'll be able to get our mitts on this thing within a week after launch, which should keep those totally stoked by tonight's event happy.

On the device shape front it's pretty much like any modern smartphone these days -- a slab of glass with a small button at the bottom. Rumours say that the home button is going to stay and I'm inclined to agree. Of course with all these dummyphonesrunning around that could be total rubbish and it'll be all touchscreen with no physical buttons on the front, but I get the feeling people like having one physical "get me out of here" button. We also don't really know what the back of the device is going to look like, but expect it to be pretty anorexic and sleek.

The Samsung Galaxy S III better be blooming magic to justify calling the rest of the competition sheep, but will it really live up to all the hype Samsung's trying to generate? We'll see. Anyone got any other guesses as to what Samsung's next flagship is going to come packing, wild or otherwise? Kudos for anyone who manages to guess right come 7pm tonight.